Page 311 - tender-is-the-night

want to shut off his view of her? He sent his words to her
like letters, as though they left him some time before they
reached her.
‘Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.’
Then they kissed passionately in the centre of the floor. She
pressed against him, and went back to her chair.
It could not go on being merely pleasant in the room.
Forward or backward; when the phone rang once more
he strolled into the bedchamber and lay down on her bed,
opening Albert McKisco’s novel. Presently Rosemary came
in and sat beside him.
‘You have the longest eyelashes,’ she remarked.
‘We are now back at the Junior Prom. Among those pres-
ent are Miss Rosemary Hoyt, the eyelash fancier—‘
She kissed him and he pulled her down so that they lay
side by side, and then they kissed till they were both breath-
less. Her breathing was young and eager and exciting. Her
lips were faintly chapped but soft in the corners.
When they were still limbs and feet and clothes, strug-
gles of his arms and back, and her throat and breasts, she
whispered, ‘No, not now—those things are rhythmic.’
Disciplined he crushed his passion into a corner of his
mind, but bearing up her fragility on his arms until she was
poised half a foot above him, he said lightly:
‘Darling—that doesn’t matter.’
Her face had changed with his looking up at it; there was
the eternal moonlight in it.
‘That would be poetic justice if it should be you,’ she
said. She twisted away from him, walked to the mirror, and

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